Turning and Vanishing
by NBarkbane
Summary: Hermione Granger knew fully well the dangers of vanishing cabinets and time turners, but everyone makes mistakes. She is thrown back into "the Marauders Era" after a mishap combining the two, and must make choices while still conscious of the future. Can she survive without meddling? (really not done at all)


Hermione Granger knew the dangers of vanishing cabinets. To be perfectly honest, she knew the dangers of almost all magical transportations, and knew she would not make the juvenile mistakes so many others had. The same was not so true with her knowledge and confidence in relationships with boys.

After a particularly aggravating row with Ronald Weasley over how ridiculous it was that he was actually _dating_ the bimbo of a girl that was Lavender Brown, Hermione had decided to take a relieving stroll around the castle. (The walk had turned out as more of a dash to find a quiet place to hide and sob, but it, nonetheless, constituted moving from one point to another using legs.) As soon as she had reached the familiar seventh-floor corridor where Dumbledore's Army meetings had taken place the year before, she began to formulate the thought that would bring her to what she needed the most. _I need a distraction_, Hermione thought to the wall where the Room of Requirement was hidden. _I can't stand thinking about him anymore. Get me a distraction. _Two doors began to form right in front of the Gryffindor's eyes, and she entered as soon as she could. When she had thought the word "distraction", she had not known exactly what she would find. Perhaps there would be books to be read, or potions to be brewed, or creatures that needed to be cared for or captured. Instead, she found herself again standing among immense, teetering mounds of other people's possessions.

(Hermione, like her fellow students Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy, had been in this room before. The previous year, she had often needed somewhere to stash her extra, and frequently frowned-upon, potions ingredients and books. She had known the danger that Harry and many of the other DA members could have gotten into, and had taken it upon herself to find potions that could help them out of unsavoury situations. Hermione was no stranger to the almost common Polyjuice Potion, which she had perfected. She instead focused on brews which could turn a person invisible for fairly good periods of time, or those which gave someone the ability to speak in any tongue or voice desired. These projects required the ample space, secrecy and rare ingredients that only the room of hidden things could provide.)

Hermione first thought that she had been taken here to find something specific, perhaps a book that told her how to deal with boys, or a pair of glasses through which one would be able to see another person's true thoughts. She tearfully combed the piles of unwanted or un-approved items for a while, often getting sidetracked trying to identify various objects she found amongst the heaps of jumble. Only after spending twenty minutes pondering what a flute-like crystal rod that emitted a beautiful, glittering, floating cloud of dark-blue water would be used for, and why anyone would need it, did she realise that any thoughts of her and Ron's predicament had been absent from her mind for quite some time. She mentally kicked herself for thinking about it again, but no longer felt quite as perturbed by the uncertainty of the feelings they felt towards each other. A new sense of calm spread through her mind, and, after checking her watch and seeing that it was nearing midnight, decided it was high time for her to return to her dormitory. Suddenly, a small grey songbird flew from under an aged sheet and nearly through Hermione's hair. Though a bit startled at the sudden visitor, the Gryffindor was more interested in where the creature had come from, and why she had not heard it until now. Pulling the shroud from the mysterious item, she found herself looking at a handsomely carved wooden cabinet. It was slightly damaged, with one of the hinges on the door looking dangerously loose, but a wondrous sight nonetheless. She immediately thought of the seemingly identical one that she, Harry and Ron had seen Draco Malfoy eyeing in Borgin and Burke's a few days before the beginning of the term. _Ron_, she thought. But she then stopped herself. Hermione would not have herself over-analyzing the possible relationship she and the youngest Weasley boy may or may not share. She would, however, continue to think about the uncanny similarities the two cabinets held, and the thoughts crowded her head as she stealthily returned to her common room.

"Where have you been, Hermione?", Ron asked her as soon as she entered the Gryffindor common room. Though she was much more composed than when she had fled from his questions about why she cared so much if he dated Lavender ("what about when you dated Krum? I didn't make a huge fuss over that" he had told Hermione, completely serious. "You're joking, right?" she had responded incredulously, and had soon after fled from the redhead), she was still not over-the-moon about interacting with him, and instead let her feet beat a path directly to the sixth-year girls' dormitory. Ron gave up on trying to speak to Hermione for the moment; she realised this while heading up the staircase, and almost felt sorry for being cold to him, but that evaporated when she heard from near the fire, Lavender Brown calling him her "Won-Won". At this point, the head beneath the curly hair was bombarded with the urge to laugh, ridicule, scream, and retch. Hermione quickly ascended the stairs and prepared for bed immediately. After drawing the curtains around her four-poster bed, she sank into her pillows and breathed a sigh of relief as she had managed to avoid encountering Lavender again. It was then that Hermione realised how tired she was, a product, no doubt, of having argued, sobbed, yelled, ran, searched and repeated many times over the course of the last few hours. Somehow, she pushed all of her feelings and thoughts out of her mind for a few seconds, and instantly fell asleep, her dreams dotted with images of birds, cabinets and, as Lavender would have said it, "Won-Won".

At ten sixteen on the morning of Saturday, April twelfth, 1997, Hermione Granger had a heart attack. The metaphorical sense, that is. She had forgotten that it was, indeed, a weekend, and woke with a jolt to a strip of golden sunlight that had slipped between the thick curtains around her bed. Springing out of the covers, she looked around for any of her dorm-mates, but they had all vacated the room and gone down to the Great Hall for breakfast. Hermione took her time in getting dressed and composed; she was still a bit flustered from her emotional expedition of the previous night. She noticed it was a crisp spring day outside, full of sunshine and clouds that looked like perfectly white pieces of candyfloss.

It was only when she reached the third floor staircase on her way down to join most of her fellow students that she would have to socialize with Ron when she reached the Gryffindor table. She wasn't quite sure that she was ready for this daunting task, and instead turned right and took an alternate path to the clock-tower. After meandering and watching the massive cogs spin their monotonous circles into each other, she took a walk across part of the grounds to the owlery. She always loved it there, so long as the birds hadn't made _too_ much of a mess. Hermione didn't mind much that she had skipped breakfast; she wasn't very hungry anyways, and was thinking about much more important things. These "important" things were really just distractions from her normal life, such as the questions: "what would it be like to be an owl?", "How many needles would be on a single pine tree" or "how _does_ Hagrid manage to get all his vegetables to grow so colossal?". By eleven-thirty, her thoughts had strayed to the cabinet in the Room of Requirement enough times to convince her to return to the mysterious area. This time, however, Hermione headed straight for the object of her thoughts when she reached the room, only being distracted twice by particularly fascinating objects in the heaps of dross she passed by.

She thoroughly examined the cabinet from both outside and in for a good twenty minutes before she concluded what it must be: a vanishing cabinet. Hermione began to wonder why a student would _own _or need to hide a cabinet, along with how they managed to covertly bring it to this room when a sound startled her. First it was the unmistakable noise the iron door the Room of Requirement possessed opening just enough for a single person to slither in, followed by the sound of firm footsteps. As each heel of the unidentified pair of shoes tapped closer to her, Hermione felt an urge to hide. And hide, she did. The curly-haired girl clambered inside the vanishing cabinet, all the while pushing some unknown object out of her way; something she was sure she should not be doing, but a necessary action nonetheless. As the footsteps drew closer, she began to fiddle with the time turner suspended around her neck out of habit, not taking care as to what she was doing. Finally the pitter-patter of feet ceased, but was replaced by a low voice, almost in a whisper, reciting some sort of incantation. Listening carefully, Hermione tried to identify the voice. Simultaneously, she realised the speaker was none other than Draco Malfoy, and that she was about to be transported in a vanishing cabinet.


End file.
